The school in question is the proposed Oasis Academy being built on the former site of the City of Bristol College in Bedminster.

Although this new school is an independent academy, it appears that BCC have some control, as evidenced by a comment from Brenda Massey (pictured), the councillor responsible for schools, namely that "…it had been a 'difficult' decision to delay the opening of the school. This was necessary in order to allow building work to be finished and remove the need for costly temporary arrangements to be put in place."

I suspect what has been 'difficult' for Councillor Massey falls into insignificance when compared to the anguish of many parents facing a city-wide dearth of 4,000 primary school places.

In an age of computer-aided design and improved building techniques it really does beggar belief that this, and other school buildings, have not managed to open on time.

It's called forward planning, and the current crisis in the council's provision for primary schools has its antecedents some five years ago – this is when children now approaching school age were born.

Moreover, despite the vagaries of shifting populations, surely it was not beyond the wit of Bristol's highly paid 'strategic' school administrators to have factored in the number of births registered in 2009 from the Bristol Register Office.

Had they done so they could probably have assessed the number of primary school places needed in 2014 with greater accuracy.

That they apparently didn't is a disgrace, and parents facing uncertain school places for their children is because of an indifferent city council.

Perhaps if the council could be metaphorically aligned with a child's school report it would read: "Could do better"!

Comments

BCC have very little control in this process. The Government decreed that any new school built has to be independant of the Local Authority. The money for this school comes directly from the Government and goes to the academy chain that is creating it. The responsibility that BCC have is to ensure that every child needing a school place has one and threfore has been landed with the problem of finding places for children because the building project was perhaps too ambitious.